If you know anything about the Large Hadron Collider, you know that it is huge. Massive. 17 miles of tunnels under Switzerland. Traditional accelerators need all that space to get particles to smash into each other at close to the speed of light. But scientists at Stanford have come one step closer to a new type…»11/06/14 4:30pm 11/06/14 4:30pm

The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is one of those places that makes magic. Originally named the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, this facility is where many modern discoveries about how matter works were made. Six researchers have earned Nobel prizes for their work at SLAC. It's also where the first website… »3/04/14 1:30pm 3/04/14 1:30pm

Just getting a particle up to near the speed of light isn't good enough for today's physics. To properly unravel the fundamentals of the universe, particles have to be smashed together with enormous force. And two Stanford researchers have just devised a laser-based method that imparts ten times the power of… »10/01/13 11:30am 10/01/13 11:30am

Conventional data transmission techniques rely on two-dimensional signals to carry the information down a pipeline, but there's only so much potential bandwidth to go around. There are only so many signals you can pack into a given plane before they begin to overlap and interfere with another. But if we were to add an… »9/25/13 6:00pm 9/25/13 6:00pm

The 21st century has been a real disappointment so far. Our robot servants top out at mediocre vaccums, self-driving cars are years away (and won't be able to fly even when they do arrive), and we're closer to inventing tricorders than phasers. A tricorder. Who wants a goddamn medical scanner when you could be… »1/29/13 3:20pm 1/29/13 3:20pm

Thirty feet beneath the hills of Menlo Park, scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator have worked for the past half century to alter our fundamental understanding of the universe. The 1.9-mile-long structure, where electrons fly at nearly the speed of light, is reputed to be the straightest object on earth.… »8/29/12 4:00pm 8/29/12 4:00pm

You're looking at the heart of the most powerful X-Ray laser machine ever created by humans, billions of times stronger than anything before it. It's the Linac Coherent Light Source and it has made something that nobody has made before in this planet: the kind of matter that you can only find in the heart of stars and… »1/25/12 7:00pm 1/25/12 7:00pm

So just how much can a digital camera the size of a Hyundai see? Hopefully, if you're the Stanford team building it, enough to answer some fundamental questions about our galaxy. »11/10/11 11:30am 11/10/11 11:30am